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October 3, 2013October 3, 2013

Dinosaurs Ruled Part of the Earth Until 2 Million Years Ago?

It’s widely believed that birds came from dinosaurs, and in fact that birds ARE dinosaurs. This of course means that dinosaurs are not extinct, that they surround us every day, and that every time I go to the pond with a loaf of bread, I’m feeding dinosaurs.

Yet that’s little comfort. After all, related or not, birds seem to have little in common with dinosaurs, at least in any way that matters — the coolness factor, right? I mean we’re talking about this:

But is this so? Now it’s widely believed that many dinosaurs had feathers, and we’re talking about the cool therapods, the meat eaters that include raptors and T-Rex. Yes, some say the T-Rex chicks (notice the word!) might have had feathers.

Now many of the dinosaurs are starting to look like this:

Now it’s a lot easier to look at dinosaurs and birds as very similar, if not practically the same. So we can start looking at the pigeons picking at the trash with awe… or look at the raptors with contempt.

But it gets more interesting. So the age of “dinosaurs” ended about 65 million years ago, right? It’s a bit hard to know what that means, given that they’re still all around us, but what if we use one metric — that they were no longer the top predators?

Then it gets interesting.

If dinosaurs are birds, then what are we to make of the belief that from 62 million years ago to a mere 2 million years ago (or less!) the top predator in South America was a… bird.